We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [45]
But we looked away, as we always did. Afterward we thought that he'd never stand a chance if he looked that way at the crew of the Anne Marie Elisabeth.
No one respects a weakling who crawls.
Hans Jørgen wasn't around to say "I told you so!" when Lorentz reported that they hit people on board ship too. He'd gone down with the Johanne Karoline, which vanished without a trace one autumn day in the Gulf of Bothnia.
The future that lay ahead of us consisted of more thrashings and death by drowning, and yet we longed for the sea. What did childhood mean to us? Being tied to life ashore and living in the shadow of Isager's rope. And life at sea? We had yet to learn the meaning of it, but a belief that nothing would ever change while we stayed on dry land took root in us. Isager was still Isager. His sons hated and feared him, and so did we. No one knew whether his wife hated and feared him too, but she'd stopped beating him up. She lived in a world of her own now. We'd robbed him of his dog, his house, and his wife's reason, but he remained unchanged. He thrashed us as he'd always done, and taught us nothing. We battled back as we'd always done, and learned nothing. We no longer persecuted him when he walked home on a winter's night after his two-finger toddy with Mr. Mathiesen, the grocer, or threw foul waste into his drawing room on New Year's Eve. But we still filled the inkwells with sand, blocked the stove, jumped out the windows, played hooky, and stole his books. Soon it would be Niels Peter scuffling with him on the floor, and one day it would be Albert.
Isager was immortal.
JUSTICE
WE KNEW THE ROPE. But now it was time to meet the sea.
Was it true, as Hans Jørgen had said, that the thrashing would never stop?
Laurids Madsen had once told Albert about punishment on board the Neversink, the naval frigate on which any wretch who transgressed was tied to the mast and whipped till he bled. They beat seven kinds of shit out of him, Laurids said. It was not an expression we were familiar with, but Laurids told us it was American. "Seven kinds of shit": we couldn't help but think that the world beyond our island was like that. The great America was like that. They had more of everything—shit included. We'd never noticed much variety when it came to our own shit. The color might change, and the texture might be either on the runny or on the lumpy side, but shit was shit, wasn't it? We ate everything—cod, mackerel, herring, sweetened gruel, pork sausage and vegetable soup, cabbage—and we knew of only one basic type of shit. So this was what the wide world would do for us. It would change our diet, so we'd be eating deep-sea monsters that our local fishermen never caught: squid, shark, jolly jumpers, bright coral-reef fish; and fruits unknown to our farmers, like bananas, oranges, peaches, mangoes, and papayas; curry from India, noodles from China, flying fish in coconut milk, snake meat and monkey brains. And when they thrashed us, we too would shit seven kinds of shit.
But in those days we mainly sailed grain to the German and Russian ports on the Baltic Sea, calling at Norway and Sweden for timber. No foreign spices, strange fish, or new fruits for us: peas, porridge, salt cod, and sweetened sago soup with barley dumplings and prunes were our daily fare. All our sauces and soups contained syrup as well as vinegar, the sweet with the sour, but we struggled to find the sweet side to life at sea. And when we were beaten, the same kind of shit still came out of us.
We said goodbye to our mothers. They'd been around all our lives, but we'd never properly seen them. They'd been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night